An operating system is a collection of software that manages device hardware resources and provides common services for computer programs. The operating system is a vital component of the system software in a device. The system software manages and integrates a computer's capabilities. The system software includes the operating system, utility software, device drivers, and other software tools. Application software can be considered to be the computer software that causes a computer to perform useful tasks in response to user requests. A specific instance of application software is called a software application, application program, application or app, which are used interchangeably below. Application programs usually require an operating system to function.
As more and more services are becoming available for data processing systems, the number of applications running in a single device has increased significantly. Multiple applications or processes in the same device compete with each other by sharing the same memory resources and computation resources embedded inside the device. The operating system performs resource/memory management to deal with resource contention in concurrent computing. In some situations, such processing resources may not be sufficient and the resource contention becomes an issue. There has been a lack of efficient ways to manage the processing resources.